fruitfarming

Upper Coomera is located in the Gold Coast region and was first explored in 1827 by Captain Patrick Logan. It was initial a prominent area for its farming of sugar and maize and timber-getting for red ceder. However, by the 1950’s half of the agriculturalists were dairy farmers and there were also a few banana and fruit farmers[i]. One of these Banana farmers was George Chester, also known as the ‘Banana Case Baron’. He claimed to be the largest single banana producer in the CommonwSource: ealth, growing up to 35 tons per week. He also owned a sawmill in Pimpanan, where he would manufacture the banana cases and use the surplus timber to build new homes, largely in the suburb of Mt. Gravatt. He would become the first Brisbane’s sub-divider and home building[ii].Many of his workers were Italian migrants, who lived in rent free homes and arracks that he built for them[iii Source: queenslandhistory.org/2019/02/george-chester-the-banana-c...

Many Chinese migrating to Australia in the 1800s came from rural backgrounds and brought with them agriculture and water management skills. As a result, considerable numbers of immigrants later took up market gardening and wider vegetable and fruit production. This was one of the few industries where little competition, and hence little friction, existed with European workers. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese market gardens became a mainstay of the urban food supply and were found in most cities and towns. Most gardens were leased by groups of five to 10 people, allowing individuals to visit China for a year or two at intervals without closing the garden. After 1878, many Chinese left Queensland’s Palmer goldfield and moved to the nearby ports of Cooktown, Port Douglas, Cairns and Geraldton (later Innisfail), where they established tropical agricultural industries. Chinese farmers cleared Atherton Tableland rainforest to grow maize,and the Hop Wah Company founded the Cairns sugar industry in 1881. Others cleared scrub along the hot, wet, coastal plain to grow sugar cane, bananas, pineapples and mangoes throughout the 1880s. They established an industry that today supplies Australia’s major cities with tropical fruit. Source: laperousemarketgardens.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/tracki...

Bananas are Australia’s largest horticultural industry and its bestselling supermarket item. Over ninety percent of Australia’s banana crop is produced in North Queensland. Banana plants were introduced to Australia in the early to mid-nineteenth century, with the first recorded cultivation taking place in Western Australia. At this point, Australia did not produce a commercial crop, with bananas intended for sale being imported from Fiji. Banana plants were probably first introduced to North Queensland in the 1870s by Chinese immigrants and Polynesians employed in the sugar industry. During the 1880s, Chinese immigrants began to cultivate fruit crops (including bananas) in the areas around Port Douglas, Cooktown, Cairns, and Innisfail. They became not only a regional success but a national one, with the Chinese community remaining the dominant force in Australia’s banana trade (both cultivation and importation) until the 1930s. The reasons for the Chinese community’s decline in influence after this point were multi-faceted, although discriminatory policies played a significant role. Shortly after federation, the Commonwealth Government passed the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), limiting ‘non-white’ immigration. Serving as the basis for the White Australia Policy, it particularly targeted Asian (especially Chinese) immigrants. Allowing immigration officers to administer a dictation test to prospective migrants in any European language (or, after 1905, any prescribed language), it facilitated indirect exclusion on racial grounds. The Queensland government also introduced legislation restricting the participation of non-European individuals in banana and sugarcane cultivation. In the tradition of the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), Queensland’s Banana Industry Preservation Act (1921) required ‘coloured’ labourers to pass a dictation test. North Queensland’s banana industry was also impacted by the return of older banana growers to China, a shift towards sugarcane cultivation among younger growers, and the difficulties posed by a combination of fruit fly contamination, cyclones, competition from Fijian imports, and transportation difficulties. The First World War had an especially devastating impact, with wartime shipping restrictions coinciding with disease outbreaks. The twentieth century was also defined by constant efforts to control the spread of bunchy top disease, an incurable viral infection, which prevents banana plants from producing fruit. (Thankfully, bunchy top has been prevented from gaining a foothold in North Queensland.) Nevertheless, banana growing only came back into its own in North Queensland following the Second World War. Source: queenslandhistory.org/2019/10/from-the-archives-early-ban...